Office 365 Gets New Word, PowerPoint and Outlook Features (networkworld.com)
New submitter Miche67 writes: As part of the July 2016 update to Office 365, Microsoft is adding several features across the board to Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Word, however, is getting the biggest new features -- Researcher and Editor -- to improve your writing. "As its name implies, Researcher is designed to help the user find reliable sources of information by using the Bing Knowledge Graph to search for sources, and it will properly cite them in the Word document," reports Network World. "[Editor] builds on the already-existing spellchecker and thesaurus to offer suggestions on how to improve your overall writing. In addition to the wavy red line under a misspelled word and the wavy blue line under bad grammar, there will be a gold line for writing style." The new features are expected to be available later this year. In addition to the two new features added to PowerPoint last year -- Designer and Morph, Microsoft is offering Zoom, a feature that lets you easily create "interactive, non-linear presentations." "Instead of the 1-2-3-4 linear method of presenting slides, forcing you to place them all in the order you wish to display, presenters will be able to show their slides in any order they want at any time," reports Network World. "This way you can change your presentation order as needed without having to stop PowerPoint or interrupt the display." As for Outlook, Focused Inbox is coming to Office 365. Focused Inbox separates your inbox into two tabs. The "Focused" tab is where all of your high-priority emails will be found, while everything else will be in the "Other" tab. Outlook will learn from your behavior over time and sort your mail accordingly. In addition, @mentions are coming to Outlook 365 and Outlook for PC and Mac, "making it easy to identify emails that need your attention, as well as flag actions for others."
Word rarely does what I want it to do so I've turned off most of the "help". Once we're forced to upgrade to this crap this will be more cruft to disable.
I can't wait to hear from our users when they whine about not being able to get their work done because Word is trying to be "helpful".
Word for Office 365: Revenge of Clippy
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
>>>> Non-linear Presentation
>> Whatever the fuck that means.
It's a new feature that allows the audience to read whatever they want into your presentation. Very popular, I would imagine.
I could argue (at least up to a point) that WordStar 5.5 had everything you need for, you know, writing.
Not at all. By far the hardest part of writing is thinking of something to say. Wordstar didn't help with that. But Bing-enhanced Word-365 can actually help you create the content. This is especially useful when you have no opinion or knowledge about the subject, such as writing a school term paper.
The only good thing about PowerPoint was that it forced people to think about what they were going to say and in what order.
Exactly. If Abraham Lincoln had Powerpoint, the Gettysburg Address could have looked like this.
If you've ever tried to get anything done with Tables or moving text round then it's taken you way longer than it used to.
Me: "I want to move this paragraph a little to the left."
Word: "No, I'm going to fuck up the entire document instead."
Me: "Insert an extra-indented bullet point here."
Word: "Excuse me while I ruin all your formatting and renumber everything from the start of your thesis."
Me: "Remove this line from the Table Of Contents."
Word: "HEY! Look at all the extra shit I found and slammed into the Table Of Contents!"
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The feature I'd like to see in Office is a search bar that finds the button you're looking for on the ribbon.